The Dowager Ordered Her to Leave Ashborne Hall After She Made the Duke Laugh—But When She Whispered, “You Mustn’t Look at Me Like That,” He Growled, “I’ll Do Far More Than Look.”

PART 8

She went to the orangery that night, and he was already there.

She was almost certain he had known she would come. He did not look up when the door groaned on its hinge. He was standing where the glass had gone, looking up at a sky the colour of wet slate, and he did not appear to have come here to do anything, which she had begun to understand was the only thing he ever did in this room.

“Your mother has found you a duchess,” she said.

“My mother has found herself a duchess. Whether I have found one is another matter entirely.”

“She is very beautiful.”

“She is.” He turned. “She is also entirely uninterested in whether I have slept, or grieved, or forgotten how to laugh. And entirely interested in the fact that I am a duke with an unentailed fortune and no wife to spend it.”

“That is unkind.”

“It is accurate.”

He turned the rest of the way, and in the moonlight through the broken glass his face was stripped of every careful structure he ordinarily wore.

“Do you know what I thought, watching her across the dinner table two nights ago?” He said it quietly. “I thought: she has never once asked me a question I could not answer without thinking. She would never ask me what frightens me. She would never sit with bad news before deciding what to do about it.”

Iris’s breath had gone shallow.

“I thought of you, Iris.” Her name, no title, dropped between them like something fragile and already falling. “I have thought of very little else for weeks.”

“Your grace—”

“Gabriel.” He said it like a man who had been holding a door shut for four years and had just let go of it. “Please. Just for this one moment, in this ruin that no one else remembers exists. Just Gabriel.”

“Gabriel.”

The name was dangerous in her mouth, and thrilling, and far too easy to say a second time.

She made herself say the rest.

“I am a companion with no fortune and a family name worth less than the paper it is written on. Your mother has brought an earl’s daughter into this house for a reason. Whatever this is — it cannot be anything.” Her voice did not shake, which she was proud of. “It must not be anything.”

“Must not,” he said, “is not the same as is not.”

He did not move toward her. He was too careful for that, too conscious of every rule he had been raised inside, to close a distance she had not yet given him permission to close.

But he looked at her the way she had only, until this moment, imagined being looked at — as though she were the only fixed point in a room that had begun to spin.

“Go inside, Iris.” His voice was rough. “Before I say something that neither of us can take back.”

She went.

She did not sleep for a long time.

The Dowager sent for her the following afternoon.

She received her in her own sitting room, with the door closed and the maids dismissed, and she looked at Iris over her spectacles with the particular coldness of a woman who believed herself to be entirely reasonable and entirely right.

“I will not insult either of us by pretending that I do not see what has taken root in this house.” She folded her hands. “My son looks at you the way he has not looked at anyone since Margaret. I am his mother. I am not blind, and I am not a fool, and I will not pretend to be either for the sake of your comfort.”

Iris said nothing.

“Let me be plain, Miss Hartley, because I do not believe in cruelty dressed up as kindness. You are the daughter of a ruined family. You have no dowry. No connections of consequence. Nothing to bring to this house but your own person — which, however admirable, cannot settle the estate’s debts, cannot maintain its lands, and cannot secure this family’s future.”

“I am aware of my position, my lady.”

“Then you will also be aware that a man in my son’s position does not get to marry for liking.” The Dowager’s voice did not rise. “If you care for him even a fraction as much as his behaviour these past weeks suggests he cares for you, you will do the kind thing. You will remove yourself from his notice before he does something foolish enough to cost this family everything three hundred years has built.”

“And if I do not?”

“Then I will dismiss you.” She said it without heat. “And you will find, Miss Hartley, that a companion turned out of a duke’s household without a reference finds very few doors open to her afterwards. I would rather not do that to you. I am asking you instead to do the sensible thing yourself.”

Iris left the room with her back straight and her hands shaking.

She walked without stopping until she reached the orangery, and she stood in the middle of it, under the hole in the glass, and let herself cry for the first time since the auctioneer’s men had carried her father’s books out of the door.

He found her an hour later.

“What did she say to you.”

His voice was dangerous in a way she had not heard from him before. Not cold. Banked. A fire with the damper shut and the heat still building behind it.

“Nothing that was not true.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, furious with herself. “I have no dowry, Gabriel. No name worth anything. Your mother is not wrong to want better for you than a companion with a ruined father and no prospects.”

“My mother does not know the first thing about what I want.”

He crossed the orangery in four strides.

“She knows what this family needs. I am so very tired of being told what this family needs — as though I am not also this family. As though four years of grief and duty have not earned me the right to want something for myself, just once, without it being weighed against an estate ledger.”

He stopped in front of her. And then, after all those weeks of not touching her, he took her face in both hands.

“I have spent four years,” he said, low, “certain that I did not deserve to want anything again. That wanting things was how you lost them. And then you appeared in my library before dawn, wrapped in that shawl and entirely unafraid of me. And I have not been able to stop wanting since.”

“Gabriel—”

“Tell me you don’t feel it.” His thumbs did not move. “Tell me, and I will let this go, whatever it costs me. But look at me and tell me honestly, Iris, that you feel nothing, and I will believe you.”

She could not.

Three months of careful discipline, and she had never once looked at him and felt nothing.

“I cannot tell you that.” Her voice came out thin. “But it does not change what your mother said. It does not change what is sensible.”

“Sensible,” he said, “has never once made me happy.”